Big Mistake -Finn
Thirty Eight
The off-white, cracked ceiling came into view first, a dead fluorescent fixture staring back at me. Then the pain caught up.
I shifted.
Big mistake.
A hot spike of pain shot through my shoulder joint, locking my body rigid. A hiss tore from between my teeth before I could stop it.
“Fuck—”
Just like that, memory returned—not gradually, not gently, but all at once, slamming into me in pieces that assembled themselves whether I wanted them to or not.
The bridge. The crack of gunfire. The impact—that single, terrible second of pressure before the heat caught up with it. Blood soaking through my jacket and Libby’s hands, and after that—nothing.
“Shot,” I muttered to the ceiling. “Right.”
That tracked.
I turned my head, moving slower this time, cataloging the room with the careful attention of someone who couldn’t afford to be wrong about their surroundings.
Metal table. Medical cabinets. Instrument trays.
Not a hospital—the proportions were wrong, the equipment scaled differently, and the smell confirmed it before my eyes did.
Vet clinic.
Then I looked down at my arm and found the IV line running into the crook of my elbow, the tubing looping toward a bag hung somewhere above my head.
My eyes followed the line back down.
And that’s when I found her.
Libby, curled up beside me on the narrow, makeshift bed, tucked into the edge of it as if she’d refused to put any more distance between us.
One arm lay close to my side, her face turned slightly toward my chest, and she breathed slow and even in the way people only manage when they’ve finally, exhaustedly let their guard down.
Something in my chest loosened so fast it almost hurt in its own right.
“She’s here,” I breathed.
Alive. Safe. Still here.
I shifted again, trying to push myself upright—
The pain returned immediately, sharper than before, and an involuntary groan escaped me.
Libby stirred.
Her brow pulled together first, a small furrow of disturbance, and then her eyes opened—unfocused for a moment, disoriented, still half-caught in sleep.
Then she looked up and found my face.
Everything in her expression sharpened at once.
“Finn?”
Her voice barely made it out, as if she didn’t trust it to carry the weight she needed it to.
I managed a rough exhale. “Yeah. Still kicking.”
Her entire face changed. Two days of held breath releasing all at once—relief moving through her so visibly it almost hurt to look at directly. She pushed herself upright fast, one hand pressing flat against my chest as if she needed the physical proof of it.
“You’re awake,” she whispered. “You’re actually—”
“Looks that way.”
A sound came out of her that started as a laugh and didn’t quite finish, her hand tightening briefly against my chest before she seemed to catch herself and pull it back, sitting up straighter and pulling composure around herself like a coat.
“You’ve been out for two days,” she said.
I let that information sink in, turning it over in my mind.
“Two days,” I repeated.
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
She exhaled another ragged breath. “You scared the hell out of us.”
I met her gaze, truly seeing her past the composure she’d reassembled. The two days were etched on her face: shadows under her eyes, lingering tension in her jaw, and hands that hadn’t quite stilled.
“Sorry,” I said.
She immediately shook her head. “Don’t.”
A comfortable, full silence settled between us.
I carefully tested my shoulder, pushing against the pain to gauge it. It was still significant, but no longer the blinding spike from a moment ago. Manageable. Something I could work with.
“Fiona,” I asked. “Is she okay?”
“Exhausted,” Libby said, “but okay. Lily, too.”
I nodded slowly, letting the relief settle deep in my bones. They had made it. All of them. Whatever had happened on that bridge and afterward, they had all reached this room.
“Good,” I said.
Another pause stretched out, and I looked back at her. “You good?”
Her expression shifted, just slightly.
“Yeah,” she said.
The word landed wrong.
I detected the seam in her voice, the place where the word didn’t quite hold together. But she offered nothing more, and I didn’t press. Not yet. She had shouldered her burdens for two days without me; she’d earned the right to set them down on her own terms.
Still, I tried to push myself upright again.
“Hey—no.” She moved closer instantly, one hand coming up. “You’re not getting up yet.”
“I’m not staying flat on my back indefinitely,” I countered.
“You’re staying exactly where you are right now,” she said, and there it was—that unyielding edge in her voice.
I let out a slow, resigned breath. “Bossy.”
“Alive,” she retorted without missing a beat.
That pulled a faint smirk from me despite everything, and for a second, something lighter moved between us, brief, quiet, and real.
Then I looked at her again, properly, letting the weight of it settle into the words before I spoke them. “You kept them safe, Lib.”
Her eyes softened in a way she didn’t try to hide.
“We all did,” she said.
I held her gaze for a moment longer, then let my head ease back against the pillow, staring up at the cracked ceiling tiles, the dark light fixture, and the ordinary, unremarkable details of a room that had, for now, become something like safety.
For the first time since the bridge, nothing required anything from me.
No running. No decisions. No counting exits or reading threats or holding everything together through sheer forward momentum.
Just here.
Just alive.
Just them, close and breathing, in the same room.
For now, that covered everything.
* * *
Two weeks.
The world had narrowed to four people, a beat-up vet clinic, and a fat orange cat who carried himself as if the apocalypse were beneath his dignity.
I healed slowly and painfully, each day a conscious effort to drag myself closer to being functional.
My shoulder burned with every wrong move, and for the first few days, simply sitting upright demanded more determination than I cared to admit.
Yet, the fever never came. The wound remained clean.
And somehow, against what I’d privately considered pretty reasonable odds on that bridge—
I didn’t die.
Fiona kept me alive with a quiet competence that instilled confidence before she’d even spoken.
Calm, precise, and utterly unintimidated by the circumstances, she worked with the clinic’s meager supplies as if she’d been doing emergency field medicine her whole life, rather than whatever she’d been doing before all this.
“You’re not dying,” she told me one afternoon, not even glancing up from re-wrapping my shoulder with efficient movements.
“Good to know,” I said.
“You don’t get to die after pulling that stunt on the bridge,” she added.
Hard to argue with that.
Lily stayed close throughout it all—quieter than usual, more watchful, but holding together better than I’d expected.
The cat helped. Doc Fluffbutt had proven to be a surprisingly effective psychological intervention: an enormous orange animal with strong opinions and absolutely no intention of adjusting his behavior for something as trivial as the collapse of civilization.
“He likes me best,” Lily said one afternoon, scratching behind his ears with the focused dedication of someone who’d made it a personal mission.
“He likes whoever’s holding the food,” I said.
“He sat with you for ten minutes yesterday,” she countered.
“And then he left.”
“Because you’re grumpy.”
“Because he’s smart.”
That drew a small, quick laugh from her, almost gone before it fully arrived, but real. And in the particular economy of those two weeks, real mattered more than size.
Libby kept moving.
That’s the only way to describe it—she simply didn’t stop.
Setting things up, reorganizing supplies, checking doors and windows with a regularity that began to look less like caution and more like a compulsion she had to work out with her hands.
There was always something new demanding her attention before she’d fully finished the last task, always a reason to be up and doing rather than sitting still with whatever she’d brought back from that store besides food.
I noticed it.
I noticed a lot of things about her, more than I’d intended, and that in itself had started to become its own particular problem I didn’t have the energy to examine properly yet.
We were alone in the back room the afternoon she told me.
She came in to check my dressing—Fiona’s instructions, a task she’d taken on without being asked. Between the silence and the close quarters, she spoke carefully, as if she’d been weighing the decision for a while.
“I went to the store. The day after we got here.”
My head snapped toward her. “Alone?”
A pause.
“…Yes.”
“What the hell, Libby.” It came out sharper than I’d intended, but not sharp enough to retract.
“I was careful—”
“You went alone,” I cut in, pushing myself upright despite the immediate protest from my shoulder. “With a gun you’d barely used before any of this started.”
“I handled it.”
“You got lucky.”
The moment the words left my mouth, I saw them land on her face and knew instantly I’d gone too far.
“I didn’t get lucky,” she said, anger entering her eyes with a directness she didn’t try to soften. “I did what needed doing because it had to be done and there wasn’t anyone else to do it.”
I leaned forward slightly, ignoring the pull and burn in my shoulder. “And what happened out there? Because you’re leaving something out.”
She held my gaze steadily.
“I ran into one.”
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
“And?”
“I shot it.”
Silence settled between us for a long moment.
I dragged a hand down my face and exhaled hard through my nose. “Jesus, Libby…”
“It came at me and I didn’t have a choice—”
“You shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” I said. “Not alone, not without someone watching your back—”
“Someone had to go!” The words came back at me with real force now, the composure she usually kept so carefully in place cracking at the edges. “You were unconscious, Finn. Fiona had her hands full keeping you alive, and Lily—what exactly did you want me to do? Send her instead?”
“That’s not what I’m saying—”
“Then say what you’re actually saying,” she said.
“I’m saying you don’t just walk into a situation like that alone, not when we can’t afford to lose anyone—”
“We don’t have backup!” she said. “There’s no one waiting to come if something goes wrong. It’s us. Four people and a cat in a vet clinic, and that is the entire situation.”
That stopped me.
Not because she’d said anything I didn’t already know—but because hearing it stated that plainly, in that tone, stripped the argument down to its actual shape. She wasn’t wrong. She’d never been wrong about the facts of it.
My chest rose and fell heavier than I wanted it to, frustration tangled up with something else I didn’t have a name for that made the whole thing worse.
“You could have died,” I said, my voice losing its edge.
“I didn’t.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is it?” she asked.
And there it was.
I had been circling the issue for two weeks, avoiding it.
“The point,” I said, “is that I can’t protect you if you do things like that without telling me.”
The words were out of my mouth, and I instantly knew
I’d made a mistake. Wrong thing. Wrong framing. Everything about it was wrong.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” she said.
“Yeah,” I replied, having committed to the argument. “You do.”
Her expression hardened with quiet certainty. “No. I need you to trust me. Those are not the same thing.”
That hit harder than anything else she’d said. Not because it stung—though it did—but because she was right, and I had known it even before she finished speaking.
“I think you don’t want to,” she added, her voice dropping slightly. “Trust me. I think that’s the actual problem.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s worse than not being able to,” she interrupted. “Not wanting to is a choice.”
The silence that followed was heavy. I looked away, running a hand through my hair, trying to get a grip on the frustration tightening in my chest—a frustration that stemmed not from her being wrong, but from her being undeniably right.
“I’m trying to keep everyone alive,” I said.
“So am I,” she countered. “I’ve been trying to keep everyone alive for two weeks, Finn. Including you.”
I knew that.
That was the core of it, the reason the entire argument was so difficult to maintain.
She wasn’t someone content to sit and wait.
She had never been that person, and our two weeks in this clinic had only amplified that fact.
I couldn’t control what she did; I couldn’t guarantee her safety in the way I desperately needed to. That gap between my need and reality—
That’s where all the conflict resided.
I exhaled long and slow.
“I know,” I said.
Not an apology.
Not quite.
But it was the truth, plainly stated, and for now, that was as much ground as I had to concede.